smuggled cigars, the owner trying in vain to look as if he rather liked
it.

The Hôtel de Genève is probably the least objectionable of the hotels
of Annecy; but the Poste-bureau is at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, and it
was much too hot for me to fight with the waiters there, and carry off
my knapsack to another house. It is generally a mistake--a great
mistake--to sleep at a house which is the starting-place and the goal
of many diligences. All the night through, whips are cracking, bells
jingling, and men are shouting hoarsely or blowing hoarser horns.
Moreover, the Hôtel d'Angleterre had apparently needed a fresh coat of
paint and universal papering for many years, and the latter need had
at this crisis been so far grappled with that the old paper had been
torn down from the walls and now lay on the various floors, while
large pies of malodorous sizing had been planted at the angles of the
stairs. The natural _salle-à-manger_ was evidently an excellent room,
with oleander balconies, but it was at present in the hands of
joiners, and a card pointed the way to the 'provisionary
_salle-à-manger'_--not a bad name for it--in the neighbourhood of the
kitchen.

There was one redeeming feature. The people of the house were
nice-looking and well-dressed. But experience has taught me to view such
a phenomenon in French towns of humbler rank with somewhat mixed
feelings. When the house is superintended with a keen and watchful eye
by a young lady of fashionable appearance, who takes a personal interest
in a solitary traveller, and suggests an evening's _course_ on the lake,
or a morning's drive to some good view, and makes herself most winning
and agreeable; who takes the words, moreover, out of the mouth of a man
meditating an ordinary dinner, and assures him that she knows exactly